On this fine summer day the Bothell Home for Wayward Seniors feels like the perfect escape from Santiago steam ... temps in the seventies and the sky a cerulean contrast to the surrounding evergreens.
Green on blue view; a most pleasing color combo
The southern front reports nineties and sticky. The little solcasa doesn't lose it's heat overnight and internal temps remain in the high eighties.
Except for missing my man and my beasts, Bothell life is good.
Side yard excavations
Toward the back construction zone; concrete walkway, gravel and bark works in progress
Little red wagon set to haul chopped up sod
To make snowbirding easier, enjoying perfect weather year-round, the Bothell yard needs to be maintenance-free, easy to care for in summer when I'm here, self-sufficient in winter when I'm putzing in my Santiago yard. To that end, the sod's gotta go, the weeds gotta go, and regrowth's gotta be stymied. In the garden, the preventer is a layer of newspaper underneath a layer of bark. For the rest, a thick layer of gravel with paths of concrete pavers.
Twinkle town, aka Green Acres, provides, free of charge, broken-up concrete, gravel and bark; all the necessary materials to build a carefree yard. Too bad the maintenance boys won't deliver!
Mom's trusty red wagon is perfect for hauling yard waste a couple of blocks to the chipper down on the corner. On the return trip, it works for hauling gravel. The garbage can on wheels serves for dragging mulching bark.
Hauling concrete's a different story, way too heavy for the ole wagon, so every time I drive the Corolla it receives a load in the trunk. My method of hauling is slow-going, but then, so is progress on the digging.
The Perfect Solution
14 July
Our old Caravan can't last forever, and it seems to be shrinking. Packing the mobile mini-clinic into the van is getting tougher and tougher.
Wandering the 'hood one day, Stan stumbled upon the perfect solution, a great old step van....
$ means "For Sale"
Coincidentally, the perfect solution to our PATA packing problem is sitting behind a hotel owned by the owner of the Picudos, our futbol team. Wouldn't it be wonderful if he were to DONATE that van to our cause?
Pipedream, I know.
Work Slowdown
8 July
The big reason work's been slow
Finally, finally the reformatting of the PATA website is finished. Now I can work on updates backlogged since last December.
Other obligations at the Bothell Home for Wayward Seniors have slowed webwork to a crawl. My apologies to my clients -- but remember, kids, you gets what you pays for!
Menu buttons
Anyway, the PATA site had a little functionality quirk, the old menu buttons misbehaved, so I totally rewrote the code, re-formatted, and installed cute little menu buttons. Well, I think they're cute.
Designing cutesy little graphics is lots more fun than rewriting and troubleshooting code. Catering to Kaiser's every whim is also distracting ... and he's just so insistent. He's positively certain that he's the center of the universe. Soooo, if the PATA site is out of date, it's all his fault.
Weather Station
24 June
Real-time weather from Santiago is being broadcast as you read this. Stan's new weatherstation has been installed, instruments on the roof and readout in the office.
Clicking on the display, here or on the home page, will whisk the curious weather visitor to the Weather Underground site where the total package is displayed with indepth readouts for wind, rain, humidity and temp.
One of the coolest things about this little machine is that it will tell us how much it is raining. During storms it's a kick to see that the downpour rate is 2 inches/hour!
Here's the big-picture readout, but check out the Weatherunderground link for even more info. Just click on the pic.
It's the Weather
21 June
Tropical weather as of 10:00 AM Seattle time
So much for last month's vacation. Tropical weather is keeping Stan busy, now that he's back home in Santiago. There's Tropical Depression Blas, Hurricane Celia, and a brand new disturbance farther south without a name, as yet.
I love Stan's Hurricane Page, shows everyone churning away in one concise location. While I'm freezing my tail off in WA, I can check his maps and forecasts and see if he and my Mexican kitties are expecting a big wind.
So far, so good; all the storms are heading West, just like we like. The only fallout that Stan has reported is a bit of overcast and some moisture cooking off of Celia and heading his way.
